Farm Interior from Rochefort-en-terre, Brittany

Backer painted this small panel depicting a farm interior at Rochefort-en-Terre, Brittany, in 1881 during a summer excursion to the Breton countryside that she shared with other Scandinavian artists. Brittany had become a major destination for Northern European painters by the 1870s, offering picturesque rural subjects and a peasant culture that seemed untouched by industrialization. The village of Rochefort-en-Terre, in the Morbihan department, attracted artists precisely because of its preserved medieval architecture and working farm life. Backer made multiple panels from Rochefort depicting farm interiors, attending to the particular quality of light in low-ceilinged Breton rooms filtered through small windows. These small panels served both as finished works in their own right and as preparatory studies for her developing interior vocabulary — the dark-beamed ceilings, stone floors, and filtered natural light of Breton farm buildings offered different optical problems from the

The small panel format enabled rapid, alla prima execution suited to the plein-air study. Backer used a limited palette emphasising the warm ochres of stone and the cool grey-blue of indirect northern light through small windows.